My MacBook’s battery took a turn for the worse last week. Luckily Apple has already sent me a new one (even though I only had 26 days left on my warranty – Apple customer service FTW).

While I waited for the new battery to arrive I played around with coconutBattery, a free download from coconut-flavour.com, which showed me the health of my battery (it weirdly fluctuated throughout the day from 96% to 54%), how much charge I had left and the number of full charge cycles it had been through.

Of course the latter two snippets of info can be found from the ‘About this Mac’ facility, but coconutBattery does more and all in one place. It tells you the original maximum capacity of your battery on day one, lets you save information about the maximum capacity of the battery at any given time and even how long you’ve owned your beloved Mac.

It will also tell you if your battery is currently charging and apparently even warns you if you’ve plugged in the wrong charger. Although how that could happen is a little beyond me.